A Wicked Scandal For The Bluestocking (Steamy Historical Regency)

by Lucinda Nelson

  Except that now he held two more of the doctor’s journals in his hands.

  Suddenly, there was a crash of breaking glass, and the next thing he knew, the place was on fire. He wasn’t sure what they had used to make the place go up so fast – or perhaps it was just that the wood of the floor was old and dry and ignited easily.

  Whatever it was, the place immediately grew hot, flames licking nearly to the ceiling before Eric could move.

  He gave a couple more shoves to the door, but although the wood creaked and groaned, he couldn’t seem to make it budge. He had to get out of here, though, and his eyes furiously scanned the place for another exit. It appeared that there was a hallway that led away into the back, but Eric wasn’t sure if there was an exit that way. Besides, there were already flames spreading down that hallway. It wouldn’t be safe to investigate.

  He cursed himself for not having scoped out the office more carefully first, maybe in daylight. He shouldn’t have rushed into things like this. He knew that this man Harvey Parsons was dangerous, and that the man knew that Eric was involved in this case.

  No one knew Eric was here in this office tonight. If he burned alive, there would be no evidence linking Harvey to the murder, and indeed no one who would ever know what had truly become of the young duke. There would be only a pile of ash and bones when they finally got the fires out.

  He swallowed hard. That was not to be his fate. He had to get out of there.

  He made certain that the journals were tightly tucked into his shirt and then ran for the window. It was his quickest way out, he was sure. And as he looked over his shoulder at the flames, he knew that the quickest way out was the only way out.

  He raised a chair and smashed the glass, ignoring how it rained down over his hands. A few mild scrapes were nothing compared to roasting alive.

  As the fresh air whooshed into the room, the flames danced ever hotter. Eric had to get out of there now. He hurried back across the room slightly and then took a running leap, rolling into the street as he connected with the ground. It was muddy after the earlier rain, but for a moment, all Eric cared about was getting a breath of cool air into his lungs.

  People were starting to gather. In this part of town, those flames would spread quickly from building to building. Eric was torn between the desire to find whoever had blocked him in and set the fire and the desire to get the hell away from there before anyone questioned what he was doing there.

  Finally, he decided to run. After all, he doubted that Parsons would have stuck around. The guy was too clever for that.

  Eric slipped away from the crowd and darted up the deserted streets, heading back towards his home. A couple times, he touched the journals under his shirt, ensuring that they were still there.

  His feet only paused when he was practically on his doorstep. Charlene. He still hadn’t found her. He glanced back over his shoulder, though, and was nearly certain that he saw a man slip away into the shadows. An involuntary shudder passed through him.

  He hoped that Charlene had followed sense and gone home to her own bed that night. If not, he hoped she was somewhere deep in hiding. But Eric knew better than to go back out himself, especially with the journals in his possession.

  If he hadn’t been certain, before, that someone was trying their best to cover up a crime, he was certain of it now.

  He headed inside and had Michael summon one of his investigators out of his own bed. “I need you to find Charlene and make sure that she is safe,” he told the man. “Check her house – see if she’s come home.”

  The man nodded and slipped away. Eric slumped on the divan and opened the first of the journals as he waited to hear the news.

  Chapter 25

  Miss Charlene Ellington

  Upon running away from the theatre and the horrible crowd there, Charlene began heading back towards her aunt’s house. But she couldn’t bring herself to go inside. What was there for her here?

  Her aunt had barely spoken to Charlene lately, ever since the scene with the Marquess. Charlene had to expect that even if they managed to pull through this, her relationship with her aunt would never be the same again.

  They would never be close, or feel like family, again.

  As for her father, when he found out about the scandal that she had brought upon the family, he would likely want nothing to do with her either. He would be disappointed.

  And that was assuming that her father was freed in the first place. Charlene couldn’t help but doubt that that would ever be the case.

  At the theatre, Eric had seemed confident that he had come up with a way to save her father. That he knew how to prove the man innocent. But if he truly had come up with the evidence that he needed, why then had he asked for the trial to be put off indefinitely?

  He wouldn’t have wanted Dr. Ellington to waste away in jail, nor for Charlene to waste away in the uncertainty of it all. So if he didn’t think that he was ready yet for the trial, that meant to Charlene that he didn’t have all of the evidence he needed.

  Which meant that now that the trial would be occurring this week after all, the only way to save the doctor would be to agree to be engaged to Lord Ambrose.

  Of course, that came with its own host of issues. There was something that had been holding her back right from the very start.

  It was the fact that she had no means of guaranteeing that if she promised her hand to the investigator, he would actually free her father.

  And somehow, she doubted that he would do something like that out of the goodness of his heart. It was no secret that the Marquess was a ruthless man, and Charlene still had the secrets about his first wife in the back of her mind.

  The Marquess would want to show his dominance over her. What better way to do that than to scorn their supposed bargain and remove her closest family member from the picture? Especially given that the whole town seemed to think that Charlene’s wild ways were the result of her upbringing by her father.

  If the wild horse had the right master, it could be tamed. Allow someone such as the doctor to continue to coddle her and it was no wonder she acted the way she did. She was sure that the Marquess was thinking along those lines.

  Either way, Charlene wasn’t sure that she could promise her hand to the Marquess. As much as she loved her father, she had to admit that there was someone else that she loved more.

  It was impossible for her to ever profess her love for the Duke or anyone. She could never even admit such words to Eric himself. But she knew in her heart that she could never willingly belong to another man as long as she was in love with Eric. No matter what was at stake.

  Was she selfish for that? Perhaps she was. Perhaps she owed it to her family to do whatever she could to save her father.

  She couldn’t believe that her father would wish for her to waste the rest of her life married to a mean man like the Marquess, however. He would have wanted more for her, even if it meant giving up his own life.

  So she believed, anyway. She only wished that she could talk to the man. Explain to him why she was unable to save him. Hear him assure her that he expected nothing more from her.

  Charlene found herself wandering aimlessly through the streets. Where would she go, if she wasn’t to return to her aunt’s house? She had enough coin on her to survive for a few nights in a cheap inn, but she would need to make more money if she hoped to survive on her own for much longer than that.

  She wondered if her aunt would send men after her. If they would comb the city trying to find the disgraced Miss Ellington, daughter of the murderer.

  She refused to stay anywhere for more than a night. The more she could keep moving around the city, the less likely she was to be found.

  As a few days passed, she felt her gloom begin to lift marginally. Perhaps this wasn’t the life that she had ever wanted for herself. Perhaps she was going to spend the rest of her days scrubbing at pots and working like a servant.

  Even this was better than being the wi
fe of the Marquess, though. She was sure of that, if nothing else.

  It did feel cowardly to hide away like this. Charlene finally turned her attention towards her father’s case. She had had a vision in the night, and she suddenly remembered Harvey. He hadn’t been Parsons then; he had called himself Harvey Blake. But she was sure the two were one in the same.

  Harvey Blake had been removed from her father’s apprenticeship. She couldn’t remember all the details, but she remembered her father’s white-lipped face and the fury with which he had spoken of the incident.

  The man had been banned from ever practicing medicine, and her father had known it was for the best.

  Somehow, Harvey must have concocted his revenge.

  She wished that she could talk to her father about all of this, but she knew that that was impossible. She couldn’t head back to Newgate to see him; they would never allow her in.

  If the trial hadn’t already happened. For all she knew, her father could already be dead. She wanted to believe that she would have heard the news if he had been hanged, but she wasn’t sure that she would given her current state of existence.

  She was lucky on the third day when an old widow took her in and told her that she could stay as long as she looked after the woman’s tiny apothecary. Charlene had no formal training beyond that which she had received from her father, but the woman seemed to approve of her methods nonetheless.

  Charlene wondered if she would still approve if the woman knew just where the younger woman’s knowledge came from. If the woman knew that she was, in fact, Charlene Ellington, daughter of the doctor who was currently up for trial for the poisoning death of Lord Henrich.

  Charlene had been careful since she had left her aunt’s house, giving the name Theresa to anyone who asked. She couldn’t handle the scandal that came along with her true name. And she had no desire to make it too easy for her aunt to track her down.

  She wished that she could apologize to Eric. She thought about writing him a letter. She knew that she had said things that she shouldn’t have to him. And that she had asked him for too much. She shouldn’t have gotten him involved with her father’s situation in the first place.

  She thought about writing to her aunt and telling Helene not to worry about her. She wasn’t sure exactly how to apologize, though. What she was really saying was that she was sorry for condemning Helene’s brother to death.

  She had destroyed her family. Charlene could barely think about it, let alone sit down and write a letter about it.

  Besides, she was worried that any letters she sent would make it too easy to track her down. She didn’t have either the money or the desire to leave London at the moment. She couldn’t go back to Bath without her father. It wouldn’t be the same. But these were the only places that she had ever called home.

  She couldn’t imagine striking out in a new city on her own. The thought made her palms sweat and her breath come short.

  She wondered how long she would be able to stay here in London. After her father was hanged, would they come for her as well? She knew that there had been plenty of sentiment against her between the scandals with the Duke and the people who believed that she had helped her father commit murder.

  Would they take her disappearance as a sure sign that she had been involved? That she was her father’s accomplice?

  She had to wonder.

  But she couldn’t go back. Either her father was dead or about to be. Her old life was gone, and her future looked bleak. She could only imagine what Lord Ambrose would have to say of her departure.

  Or everyone else in society. They probably thought she was prostituting herself to have a place to stay.

  She didn’t care about what any of them had to say, however. All she cared about was what Eric must think of her. But she supposed that that didn’t truly matter. She loved him, but he didn’t love her. He had told her once that if their positions were different, he would marry her.

  Their positions weren’t different, though. He was a duke, and she was the spinster daughter of an accused murderer. He might wonder what her fate was, but he wouldn’t come looking for her.

  Charlene was alone. But no matter how bad things looked, no matter how hard she was going to have to work, at least she was still alive. It was unfair, and she ached with every fiber of her being. But in her heart, she knew that it was best to just make due.

  Chapter 26

  Lord Eric Cumberland, Duke of Havenport

  Eric was shocked when the journals actually mentioned Harvey Blake. He had lost hope that they ever would. As the trial grew closer, the doctor’s situation seemed bleaker and bleaker.

  He had let Charlene down.

  Charlene. He wondered where the woman was now. She had disappeared after the scene at the theatre. Helene was frantic. Eric couldn’t help but echo her fear, but his own worries were far grimmer than anything that the elderly aunt could ever imagine for her niece’s fate.

  Eric knew men only too well, and he now knew the story behind Harvey Blake’s ban from ever having anything to do with the medical field.

  He stared down at the journal entry in front of him, his heart in his throat and his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. Dr. Ellington had written that Harvey was a sadist and unprofessional. Those descriptions were damning enough, but if it was simply that, he might have kept practicing.

  Except that Dr. Ellington had discovered that Harvey was administering poison to a number of local girls in Bath, seeing which levels would harm them. The journals weren’t clear on which girls were involved, unfortunately. It would have made their case so much stronger if Eric could have brought them to testify against the man.

  Still, if anyone would have known how to kill Lord Henrich, it sounded as though Harvey Blake, now Harvey Parsons, was the man. Eric could even fathom how he had done it. It would have been quite simple, really.

  He merely had to give the correct medicine to Dr. Ellington first. Then go behind the doctor’s back to deliver medicine to Lord Henrich, insisting that the doctor had made a clerical error and that this was the correct medication to take. He would have confiscated the original, so there was no evidence. Lord Henrich would have taken the wrong medicine and then died.

  A simple matter of slightly falsifying the records, then.

  Or perhaps it had been even simpler than that. Perhaps all he had done was create a medicine that appeared to be the one Lord Henrich needed but which, given with improper dosage, actually did something else. Eric had heard that there were certain concoctions which, although normally not poisonous, could prove poisonous in the wrong situations.

  However he had done it, Eric was certain that Harvey had a motive. From the sounds of things, Dr. Ellington was responsible for Harvey’s disbarment from the medical field. Eric wondered if he would be able to convince anyone from the medical college to testify to that fact. They had rejected his bribe before and refused to give him any of the information that he had requested, but surely in the face of this information, they would want to help the doctor.

  But either way, the duke knew that it would be better if he could actually track down the sadist and bring him to trial. There was too much anger in this city at the moment for there to be no vengeance for the murder of Lord Henrich.

  Trouble was, there had been no further information about the man since he had slipped through his operatives’ fingers.

  Eric sighed and paced back and forth in his study.

  To be honest, he didn’t know exactly why he was still so invested in this case. Charlene was gone. She had made it very clear that she didn’t believe him when he said that he was going to prove her father innocent.

  For all that he knew, she could have gone to Lord Ambrose to promise her hand to him and ended up a victim of his cruelty already. Or Harvey could have gotten to her.

  It was all Eric could do to keep from seeking out the young woman. Charlene had made it clear that she didn’t want to be found. She had made it clear that
she had lost faith in him. And besides, what could Eric really say to her?

  Her father was up for trial very soon, and in spite of the fact that he kept telling her that he was going to prove her father’s innocence, he didn’t have all the proof just yet.

  He tried not to grimace when his mother came into the study. She raised an eyebrow at him. “Have you forgotten that you have a ball to attend this evening?” she asked, and Eric could hear from her tone of voice that she was trying to hide her disappointment in him.

  She hated that he was still so caught up in proving Dr. Ellington innocent.

  Not because she wanted an innocent man to go to his death, of course. But she didn’t see what sort of stake Eric had in proving the doctor innocent. She merely knew that Eric was involving himself in something that was dangerous, and something that had proved time and again that it could ruin his reputation.